The photo tells some of the story: senior executives from LG Display and Idemitsu Kosan, duplicate ceremonial pens and copies of the memorandum of understanding, and the crossed flags of Japan and the Republic of Korea.

Ken Werner
Senior Analyst and Editor

The rest of the story is this. Yesterday in Tokyo one of the world’s leading display makers and a leading provider of OLED materials formed an alliance they hope will accelerate their respective OLED businesses. The MOU was signed by Vice President Byung-chul Ahn, who heads LGD’s OLED Business, and Yoshihisa Matsumoto, Executive Director of Idemitu’s Electronic Materials Department. Part of LGD’s strategy is "to raise its competitiveness in the OLED business," according to a company press release.

The MOU specifies the companies will cooperate on technology development, will cross-license patented OLED-related technologies, and will cooperate to develop high-performance OLED displays. LGD believes the agreement will allow it to secure a stable source of OLED materials (including device-structure proposals) and accelerate the growth of LGD’s OLED business, "which is emerging as a new growth engine." Idemitsu secures a (potentially) major customer for its OLED materials.

"[The agreement] will contribute significantly to our ability to respond to the mid to large-sized OLED market of notebook PCs and TVs over the mid to long-term," Ahn said.

As has been true for all display technologies, the path to high-volume manufacturing and larger sizes for AMOLEDs has been slower and harder than anticipated. That has disheartened the "We’ve-gotta-make-money-by-Tuesday" investment crowd, and left most of the serious development to large corporations with deep pockets and patient corporate cultures. (There are some exceptions on the materials side, including Universal Display Corp. in the U.S., whose executives will send me e-mails if I don’t include this comment.)

But that slow, steep path is finally getting faster and broader. DisplaySearch projects the OLED market will grow to $1.05B in 2009 from $0.6B in 2008, and up to $3B in 2012. Some of that growth will be in medium-sized displays for Netbooks and notebook PCs as AMOLEDs in those sizes become more affordable. But that time is not quite here yet. For example, a Kodak digital photo frame with 7.6-inch AMOLED display sold for $999.99 during the last holiday season, and a Kodak representative at Pepcom’s Digital Experience in New York last night would not speculate on when that price might drop.

But the scalability issues that have kept substrate sizes down and prices up are being addressed in a variety of ways, and LGD is certainly one of the companies working on them seriously. The current announcement signals just how serious LGD is, and that its ambitions extend to larger-than-cell-phone sizes. That could also be seen at the recent SID meeting, where LGD showed a 15-inch AMOLED TV panel with 1366×768 pixels, and an LTPS backplane made with the company’s Advanced Solid Phase Crystallization (A-SPC) technology, which does not use the dreaded excimer laser annealing. Also on display was a 19-inch FHD (1920×1080) AMOLED using the company’s interesting but somewhat problematical dual-plate OLED display (DOD) structure and a-Si TFTs.

LGD has clearly been doing serious AMOLED development, but most of the product has been delivered by Samsung Mobile Displays and Chi Mei EL. LGD wants those winds to change, and is working to make it so.